It looks cheap and poorly made, though. With this budget, they could have just made scale armor that actually looks like scale armor. Especially for prominent characters.

The costumes are good, but the armor in the show is all over the place.

According to this blog post by a military historian, that “scale” armor you linked is the worst of a bad bunch:

Perhaps the worst offender (which unfortunately gets a lot of screentime) is the odd Númenórean scale armor. Now scale armor was not necessarily a bad idea here (it could make for an interesting visual motif connecting the seafaring Númenóreans with fish-scales, for instance), but there are two immediate problems with this armor. First, it doesn’t seem structured like scale armor. The strong cording around the edges and rigid spaulders make it look like rigid armor made to look like it is composed of scales. The effect is only increased because the backing is shaped to give it pectoral muscles (and chests for women, which is doubly silly). But that’s not how historical scale armor hangs on the body.

Scale armor is [supposed to be] a lot more flexible (with the downside that the very flexibility of the scales means that a strike from below can pass beneath them and through the armor) and would thus hang and shape to the body. This armor does not do that. Instead as noted what this looks like are solid plates that are made to look like they are made out of scales. And that’s also not a terrible idea except that the actors are then also wearing scale-armor-print shirts underneath the armor which makes it clear that we’re to understand a flexible scale armor covering the whole of the upper body, which this clearly isn’t.

What on earth is this armor made out of? The queen’s armor looks like it might be bronze, albeit less well polished than I’d expect for royalty, but everyone else’s scale armor is made of this dull off-white material that looks like plastic or pressed foam, presumably because it is plastic or pressed foam. Surely this stuff should be made of iron?

All the major outlets are reporting that the FBI confirms it’s him now. Very confusing, all round.

https://archive.is/20240714054831/https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-identifies-thomas-matthew-crooks-subject-involved-trump-rally-shooting-2024-07-14/

https://archive.is/20240714055509/https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/07/14/donald-trump-shooter-pennsylvania-rally/74396853007/

Shooter appears to be a white male, aged 20s or early 30s by the look of it. The t-shirt he was wearing is allegedly marked with branding for a firearms-related YouTube channel.

https://x.com/Shadi_Alkasim/status/1812315218258833590

Edit: Possible suspects are either Maxwell Yearick, previously arrested while demonstrating against Trump in Pittsburgh on a previous occasion, or a Thomas Matthew Crooks, according to the NY Post.

Hasn’t been officially ID’d yet though, so still speculation.

And every time, the taxpayer foots the bill. Until the funds start coming from police pensions, nothing is going to change.

Lol you’re right about this giving native English speakers a headache. I’m not sure the subjunctive is the correct explanation here, though.

The subjunctive mood in English primarily uses the past tense form of verbs (“were,” “were to,” etc.) to convey wishes or counterfactuality. E.g. ‘I wish you wouldn’t drink so much coffee’, or 'If I were you, I wouldn’t…"

However, ‘would you like a coffee?’ is a direct question of preference, which means it technically is using the indicative mood rather than the subjunctive. Here, ‘would’ functions as a model verb to soften the request and make it more polite.

Now there’s an idea.

Ah yeah, I see what you mean. Fair point.

True.

On what basis doesn’t it work, though? I’m still not sure I understand what the problem is with your example.

You would be hand picking less qualified men to compete with the women just to fill it up.

Another way of looking at it is that we would in fact be widening the criteria of who would be considered “qualified”.

I would say the opposite, in fact.

Eugenics is the belief and practices that aim to “improve” the genetic quality of a human population to meet an idealized optimal standard. Under my proposed system, you could argue it would allow for a greater diversity of individuals that would be able to compete, and therefore would lower the necessity of having the optimal physical traits required in order to take part in each sport.

But like I said, that’s fine. The point is that we would then be categorizing people not according to their gender but by factors that directly affect their athletic performance.

Another benefit would also be that it would allow a wider range of people to participate at the national and international level, seeing as it would not remove all but those women and men who possess the optimal physical traits required for that particular sport.

That’s why they would need to take more into account than simply weight. Surely multiple physical and hormonal factors could also be measured and an aggregate total value be applied to each athlete.

In general, sure, but not all men are more muscular and stronger than all women.

Furthermore, even if, say 90% (or even 100%) of the heavyweight category were men, it would still be fairer for everyone.

For a while I’ve been thinking that all sports should get rid of gendered male/female competitions and replace them with weight categories that take into account physiological characteristics like muscle mass, testosterone levels, weight, height, etc. This would result in, say, three to four categories ranging from lightweight to heavyweight.

Why wouldn’t this work?

IMO, the first statement is half-stupid, the second one is half-overcomplicated :)

Welcome to English, my friend. No one ever claimed that it wasn’t a pain in the arse to learn :)

Lol well teaching this professionally surely makes me some form of authority (albeit of course not the authority!) on this subject.

To clarify, your original point sounded like you were making a distinction between metaphorical mirrors and actual mirrors:

“in the mirror” tends to more often refer to a metaphorical “mirror”, typically when discussing self-reflection

• “I took a look in the mirror and decided to change my ways.”

“in a mirror” tends to refer most often to actual mirrors that exist in reality, not metaphorically

• “I looked into a mirror to fix my eyeliner.”

This incorrect distinction is what I was objecting to, because of course we can use both the indefinite and definite articles to refer to either literal or figurative mirrors.

Nope, as I explained in my other comment, it’s standard usage.

In English, we often use the definite article when speaking in general about a specific activity or action that involves a non-specific object. E.g. “go to the bathroom” or “catch the bus”, or “read the newspaper”. It’s not poor form at all.

A fair guess, but this isn’t one of those times when a grammatical error becomes normalized through common usage.

There is no grammar rule that separates speaking literally versus metaphorically in this case.

“You have something on your face; go take a look in the mirror” is just as grammatically correct in English as “You need to take a good look in the mirror and change your ways.”

I’ve explained why this is standard usage in English in my comment here.

English teacher here. Articles in English can be really confusing but essentially we use the definite article in this situation because:

• Uniqueness: In most situations, there’s only one mirror in a room or a home that’s readily available for someone to look into.
• Generality: Similar to “going to the bathroom,” “look in the mirror” refers to the general act of using a mirror to see oneself, not interacting with any specific mirror.